Some Reflections
Finished The Sanguine Experiment; what next?
And wow.
I really didn’t want to end it here but my imaginary boyfriend is a fucking asshole sometimes and he said THERE’S YOUR ENDING.
Oh how I resisted. I wanted redemption. I wanted more dialogue. I wanted — but none of that’s necessary. The story’s done when Walter gives up his dream just as he realizes it. And he’s not wrong: It is a banger of an ending.
This whole extended section of Sad Guy was his idea. Walter wanted me to write about him from his perspective, and I’m not sure why. He hates to be exposed. And he didn’t want to be coddled.
So I guess Chrysalis is the end of The Sanguine Experiment. I haven’t pulled the eight stories over to a Word doc to check the word count, but I think the total can’t be much more than 25K. The two-part novella Sad Guy on the Bus that starts it off was about 10K, I think.
I don’t want to write an interpretation; like Walter, I tend to distrust things that mean. As he says, Fuck your allegories. (I think I need to rename Chrysalis as Fuck Your Allegories.) But certainly they got their wishes. And now Linen is trapped in amber while Walter carries her body like Sisyphus toward a tree line he may never reach.
To put it all together, I’d need to take off the framing device from Sad Guy. I suppose the Divorced Adjunct could be a secondary character. Maybe Walter kills her before he gets around to Linen. But I like the slow burn of him having killed only the one girl, by accident — not exactly accident, but out of a youthful illusion of immortality — and then discovered at the same time 1) That he wants to kill more people; he has a taste for it, and 2) That he has a hard moral limit; no matter how much he wants to hurt folks, it seems to him unequivocally wrong to do so. A violation of their free will.
Not that he actually feels bad about it, of course. That’s nothing, he says when Linen shows sympathy for Laura. She wanted to be there. When Linen finally forces herself into his notice he makes a bargain with himself: If she offers her life freely, he’ll take it. It’s always been Walter across the chessboard from the Devil. And the Devil does keep his promises — with a twist.
I’ve enjoyed writing about Walter’s anorexia, which is only a little touched up from my own. The day I left off writing narrative journals and started keeping calorie counts was one of the happiest of my life. I was 16 and in love with a boy who didn’t notice me. I lived in a house where “talking back” was met with a knock-you-backwards slap, and even the wrong expression on your face counted as “talking back.” But here was one area in life where I was in charge.
I recently heard gymnast Nile Wilson describe anorexia as an addictive behavior. It is that. It’s also an existential exercise, as Walter says again, measuring the will out in ounces.
When I first met Walter back in 1999 or so, he looked like Jack from Fight Club — the underfed, unhappy office worker with his fridge full of condiments, mascot of Gen X. Now I don’t think he’s much like Jack, though I still use the movie character as a visual reference (and a vocal reference — Ed Norton with a north Appalachian twang).
But I was thinking hard about creating surreal worlds. I wanted to write a world in which an outrageous counter reality slowly creeps up on our consciousness. If not in Chuck Palahniuk’s neck of the wood, then somewhere close by — maybe somewhere written by China Mieville or Jo Walton.
Linen’s a good witness for Walter because she believes in fairy stories. She’s wrong about their interpretation, probably, but she’s well-equipped to allow the crazy to happen. She wants there to be dragons.
Yeah, I know she turns into stone. Well, amber, anyhow. But whaddya want? She was willing — eager — to give her life to a bad-tempered stranger. You get what you get when you do what you do. And now she has Walter to look out for her. He seems pretty dogged. She’ll be all right.
That Walter. My dear Sad Guy. He puts me to sleep whenever I ask him to, but he never lets me stay under, no matter how much waking up hurts.
So yeah. I have the ending, but I need to pull this into Word documents, fix up the twofer Sad Guy, and then create a second version of Sad Guy without the frame and build up The Sanguine Experiment to really be worthy of that ending.
Achievement unlocked.